Good news! Week of June 11- 17, 2017

Small victories, local heroes, sweet stories, random kindnesses, unexpected grace, cold justice served up on a hot plate…that’s what this diary is about. As always, your interpretation of what is “good news” is probably different than mine. And that’s fine. Something I’m missing? Add it in the comments.

LGBT:

Massive Marches may move us, but the biggest and gayest parade this year in Colorado will be Pridefest, this Sunday June 18. Civic Center Park will host the celebration all weekend. For your daily minimum requirement of fabulousness, go to Pridefest Denver. (Photo from 2016 Pridefest, Wikipedia Commons)

LGBT hero: One of the Capitol Police agents wounded in the recent terrorist attack in DC was Crystal Griner, a married lesbian woman. Griner and her fellow officers, including David Bailey , rushed the shooter, taking him down and preventing a massacre.

Colorado

So far Colorado has a good snowpack, melting steadily. This is good news because we may not have the catastrophic flooding and wildfires, that we have seen in other years as effects of climate change. Drought and heat, though….no relief in sight – sorry, farmers.

Greeley’s tap water passes the taste test. I remember Greeley’s water being heavily chlorinated from passing through too many cows, but maybe it’s improved in the last two years.

Wasn’t it a chicken crossing the road, and a bear shitting in the woods? – but these Colorado runners encountered a bear on the run. (Photo by Donald Sanborn, posted on Facebook, usage rights given to media organizations)

The appeals court applied a three part test (including a mathematical test called the "efficiency gap", which calculates votes "wasted" by party affiliation) in determining that Wisconsin Republicans had effectively (and intentionally) deprived Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters of representation. Justice Kennedy has long suggested that this might be unconstitutional, but that no effective test had been presented to allow the Court to rule such. This case presents one such test.

The North Carolina gerrymandering case has been interesting to follow.

The Democratic governor attempted to call a special session to resolve the maps. The Republican legislature (under unknown authority) rejected the call. The District Court judge who originally ruled on the case (and will get it back from the Supreme Court shortly) asked both sides for opinions on how long it should take to redraw the maps that he asked the legislature to redraw way back when – or if the legislature even deserves more time to redraw the map given how long they've had…. Gov. Cooper asked the Supreme Court to speed up return of the case to the District Court because the state's constitution has a 2017 special election running out of time; the Court said no…

So when the case comes back to the District Court some time later this month, the judge will have only a few weeks to decide on a map unless either the election slips to 2018, or he decides it's worth overriding the state constitution just this once to resolve a Federal issue.